Six Tips To Not To Cut Your Face Up, Or: A N00b's Advice On Straight Razor Shaving
It’s been three weeks since I last drew blood with Floyd the straight razor, and as such I feel compelled to speak upon what I have learned. The straight razor is good tool for shaving, but it’s also got some finicky bits I figured I’d go over.
Tip #1: Get a really good shaving cream.
Oh, you can use thin soap, or even *gasp* just hot water, but a good rich later is like training wheels; it lets the blade slide over your skin easier, and any time it’s sliding over your skin it’s not cutting into it.
I myself use Jack Black Supreme cream, which I highly recommend, but the shaving cream that came with my kit was crap and the Burt’s Bees stuff I got at Walgreen’s slightly less crap. Find something thick and gooey, and don’t skimp on the application. My cutting went way down when I got a good lubricant.
Tip #2: If the grip feels uncomfortable, it’s not gonna work.
The razor is a simple tool: one handle, one blade, one pivot. And when you start out, you’ll see all sorts of potential grips to hold this deadly thing, each designed for someone to hit a different area of their face. And you’ll emulate some of these, and they’ll feel wildly wrong to you. Not just “uncomfortable,” for every time you bring a blade against your skin you’ll feel a bit odd, but wrong, as in your fingers feel like they’re about to slip.
Every one of those wildly wrong grips wound up carving me up like a turkey.
Eventually, I settled for a grip that appears in no manual I’ve seen, but it feels comfortable for me. The point is that the grips are the suggested starting points; you’ll evolve your own, soon enough, and the sooner the better. Don’t try to emulate others, find your own method.
Tip #3: Only shave with the grain the first few weeks. Then shave against.
When you start out, shaving down your cheeks is easy; you’re not levering the blade under the hairs, thus potentially sawing down and cutting yourself. And then you go upwards, shaving at a more awkward angle, one where any looseness of the skin will kill you, and whoops – cuts.
My advice is to only shave with the grain, until you get a sense of how to cut easy hair. Then, once you’ve mastered that, move on to against the grain, which will involve more cutting, but you’ll at least have less cutting because you know the basics.
Tip #4: Know Thy Face.
Eventually, you’re going to realize that your face has its own hollows and bumps, treacherous areas and easy passes. That’s why you pay attention while you’re shaving – to try to figure out what areas you really need to pay attention to. For example, weirdly enough, I have never once cut myself on the underside of my throat above my Adam’s apple – you’d think I would, but the skin is taut and forgiving.
My pudgy cheeks, however? The doughy skin there attracts cuts like mosquitoes.
Your end goal will be to make two or three passes over your face, and to do that you’ll need to recognize that not all facial areas are equal. Some will hurt you if you’re not paying attention. So make a mental map of your visage, and start seeing where the issues are. It’s a weird thing, but oddly pleasant once you start; it’s getting in touch with your own body, finding strange surprises in something you thought you knew all too well.
Tip #5: If you’re unsure, either stop or keep going.
All of my cuts come from hesitation. The goal is to sweep smoothly across the skin. And if you hit a point where you’re not sure whether you should keep going, you need to do one of two things:
a) Stop.
b) Keep going like you were.
However, most novices seem to go with c), slow way down, which is your worst option. When you slow down, your hand starts to tremble a bit, you often unconsciously pull away a little, and then the skin slackens and the edge bites into flesh. It took me a while to realize that shaving is, in fact, about confidence – when you’re not sure, either pull the blade away completely, relather, and go at it again, or confidently move forward as if you know what you’re doing.
Strangely, as in life, that usually works out.
Tip #6: Lather up a balloon. Shave it. When you can scrape all of the lather off the balloon without popping it, you can shave a face.
…okay, I’ve never done that. But that’s how they taught my barber in barbers’ college. Isn’t that cool? I mean, Gini would have killed me, spattering lather all over the walls and filling the house with sporadic explosions, but I think it’s fucking awesome and at least one of you should do it. And YouTube it. YouTube it copiously.
It's Not That I Don't Care. It's That I Don't Care About YOU, Sir.
“You don’t seem to care what people think,” she said. “Which to me is very cool.”
Thing is, that’s not true. Yes, I reveal a hellish amount of personal data in my blog, sharing emotions, taking controversial opinions, basically putting myself out there so that strangers can come to loathe me. And I can see how you might think that I just don’t care.
But I do. That’s why I’ve become so careful with my essay writing – writing slower and more precisely so I can’t be misunderstood by your run-of-the-mill reader. It’s why I pay close attention to comments, retweets, and incoming blog links. I’m actually completely paranoid about what you good people think.
Yet there’s the rub: you good people.
I have zero problem ignoring the opinions of idiots.
It’s a survival mechanism I developed in high school, back when bullies used to use my shame as a weapon against me. I’d spend whole summers trying to be cool for their benefit – pretending I spent my weekends partying, hiding my books, dressing differently, in all ways showcasing my cringing fealty to them. Because even though they were mean and scornful, I was convinced that if I could just act the right way, I’d eventually gain their affection. You know, like in every movie, where the bully finally gains a grudging respect for his enemy.
But that’s not real life. If you’ve ever tried to suck up to a bully, you’ll know what happens: show up in the fine set of jeans they’ve been ragging you about for not wearing, and they’ll deride you for something else. Or they’ll mock you for thinking you’re good enough to wear those jeans. Doesn’t matter. Come up to the level they claimed you needed to be at, and bullies will raise the bar.
After eating a whole adolescence’s worth of humiliation, I burned out. One day I woke up and realized there were some opinions not worth listening to. Bang. Bullies shut down. My life’s been a lot better since.
Since then, I’ve tried hard to gain the favor of people I respect. Whenever someone I like links to a blog post I wrote, I’ll do a little happydance. And when they criticize me because I’ve been racist, or sexist, or unclear, or just perhaps plain bullheaded, I have listened. If you were to take the time to read my blog archives – and good luck with that – you’d see that I’ve changed my mind on any number of topics over the years. My whole approach to blogging has changed. I refuse to take the old entries down, because I believe that people should come to believe that there’s an arc between where someone was a decade ago and where they are now… But dammit, that doesn’t mean I’m not embarrassed.
I am an antenna, listening. I worry. I want to do the right thing. And on the rare occasions I blow it big time, I literally feel sick.
But! If you prove to me that you’re an idiot, off you go. You can comment, you can be mean, you can do whatever – I don’t care. Because you’ve proven that you’re not sufficiently in touch with reality that I can ignore you. Emotionally, that kind of guy means nothing to me – not quite a bully, for not every dissenting opinion is intended to bash, but certainly not someone who I’d be healthier or wiser if I listened to them.
So why should I bother? I’ll read the words; I just won’t be emotionally affected by them.
I can even micro-idiot, if need be. For there are many people I adore who are idiots on a certain topic. Craig is a wonderment when it comes to politics, but God forbid you look at his string of depressing relationships and try to take poly advice from that. Farrah is perhaps the smartest person I know when it comes to dissecting racial topics, but God forbid you get her going on health care. And so, when they comment on a certain topic, I just shrug and say, “That’s their opinion, and I don’t think it’s right.”
(I don’t say “They’re wrong” except in all of the most dire disagreements, as I find a “wrong” for me often leads to “Well, I never have to question that assumption again” – but rather, “I have done the requisite thinking on this topic and concluded that the evidence is in my favor, so I’m not going to put any more processing time into this until some other relevant factor arises.” Not as punchy as “You’re wrong,” but it leads to a better life.)
Furthermore, if you think I’m an idiot, well… I might be. Part of my whole survival mechanism consists of constant self-investigation, probing my weak and strong points alike to see if they could be bolstered… and a large part of that function involves being brutally honest with myself. I’m frequently wrong. I don’t always get it right. And I can either get wrapped around the axle of “ZOMG I WAS SO RIGHT THIS TIME” – or I can do the better thing of actually getting it right next time.
It’s a polling process, for me. One person I respect thinks I’m an idiot? That’s gonna happen from time to time. Store it in the file. Three people I respect think I’m an idiot? We’re treading closer to danger. Ten people, and I start looking for my donkey’s tail.
But there’s no shame in being wrong. There’s shame in not admitting wrongness. And that’s a vital point that most people miss.
Tl;dr – yeah, I care. I care a lot. But I care only about the opinions of people who’ve proven they’re smarter than I am, and I recognize that I’m gonna get it wrong a lot. So being wrong? Not a problem. Shrugging off jerks? Not a problem.
It lets me be happy. And bold. And, occasionally, even in a position to do some good. So I keep at it.